The Haidren Legacy (Books 1-2)

“You’re holding back,” he taunted. “Is the witchling too tired to play after a night under another yancy?”

“If you don’t hold your tongue, I might just cut it out!” She struck his thigh with one baton and the side of his head with the other, then stepped back to calm herself.

“I was taught y’siti never grew tired.” His eyes sparkled viciously as he blinked the pain aside. “Is it the heart or the lungs your mother eats after you’re born?”

Her jaw clamped shut, veins filling with fire. She cracked her neck and stepped away. “These lessons are over.”

When her boot met the stone, she turned her back to Kasim, eager to shake off his insults, but he only chuckled. It was a cruel sound, like that of his father when they’d met on her first night in the city.

“You’re getting flushed, you know. I hear Boreali flesh isn’t so corpselike when it’s flushed. They say it burns quite beautifully in the heat of passion. Uni, like a yaya between some yancy’s legs.”

Luscia froze. The horrific scar tissue on her neck throbbed as she thought about Ambrose and his body pressed against Mila. The pulsing changed to a scald as her mind flooded with images she’d ached to forget and a sensation she’d strived to wash away.

“Ah, is papyon what makes your kind come alive, little y’siti?” She heard Kasim’s poison over the rushing in her ears. “A pair of soft, Unitarian hands all over your body—”

Luscia screamed with a waking wrath that consumed her entire being. She spun in place, pulled her mother’s consort dagger from its sheath strapped across her thigh. Nearly jolted by an outbreak of light, she threw Ferocity along the threads of lumin, aiming straight for Kasim’s skull.

With a clatter, the dagger hit the wall and jangled against the floor. The threads shuddered at the sound and coiled in a makeshift fence surrounding them.

She tasted iron on her tongue when his fingers wiped blood away from a cut near his temple. To her shock and dismay, he grinned at the sight.

“There you are.”